1. Field
The present invention relates to gaming applications, and particularly to a method, system, and/or device that maps features in a real environment to a virtual environment to extend the gaming landscape and player interaction to the real environment.
2. Background
Virtual worlds allow people to immerse themselves in an environment while playing the role of a made-up character. Virtual world gaming has become very popular in recent years, some games attracting millions of players. The attraction of such games is that there is a rich fantasy world in which cooperating groups of players solve puzzles, collect magic things, and/or kill monsters, but the players seem to derive much of their pleasure from the interactions with each other, rather than merely from the game itself. However, some significant downsides to such virtual world games is that they keep players sitting on a computer for long periods of time, limit real world interactions, and often lead to gaming addiction.
It is also clear that not all of the value in communication comes from having content pushed to the user. The biggest growth areas have been things like presence services such as Instant Messaging and chat rooms, and multi-player games such as virtual world gaming. Some multi-player virtual world games include chat capability automatically. Everquest™ and World of Warcraf™ are examples of two such virtual world games.
Another phenomenon is the “flash mob”, where a large group of people assemble suddenly in a location, do something for a brief period of time, and then quickly disperse. For example, hundreds or thousands of people may use internet instant messaging or cellphone SMS to organize a sudden get together. The first flash mobs were benign, parties or mass pillow fights, but more recently the same organization methods have been used to create mass demonstrations in France. The common theme is communication-enabled interpersonal interaction.
“Orienteering” has been popular for some decades, but is currently being revolutionized by location services in the form of global positioning systems (GPS). A larger scale phenomenon that has come about more recently is “geocaching” in which people go searching for treasures that other people have planted, based only on a fine-grained location and description of the hiding place. Surprisingly, there is still a large element of interpersonal interest in geocaching, because the players usually communicate with other players by writing in log books left with the treasure, and often leave treasure items of their own in place of whatever they might take. Communities arise to chat on the internet about what they have been doing.
Consequently, an opportunity exists for developing services and/or business models based on virtual world and/or real world communication-enabled interpersonal interaction.